1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to entertainment systems, and, more particularly, to entertainment systems that can be personalized to a user's preferences.
2. Description of the Related Art
State of the art entertainment systems, mobile players and car radios, have access to two different kinds of sources: music locally stored in the device, e.g., in flash memory or on a hard drive, and music stored outside the device. Locally stored music usually resembles the music collection of a user or at least resembles parts of the collection. Music from outside the device might be received from temporarily-connected storage devices, FM/AM/XM and digital radio broadcast, internet streaming or other web services that offer music.
The amount of music stored in the entertainment device is naturally limited by the storage size available. New music has to be manually copied into the device memory. Some state of the art MP3 players such as the Apple iPod use the concept of “synchronization”, wherein a number of manually- or automatically-selected songs from a larger collection is copied into the player's memory whenever the player is connected to a computer. Even though this kind of copying is more automated, it still requires the user to manually connect the player to an external device. Without the external device, the player or entertainment system does not receive new content. In contrast, music from external sources offers basically unlimited amounts of music and variety and the user does not have to worry about storage issues.
On the other hand, external music sources face a number of limitations. When playing radio broadcast or audio streaming, the order of songs is predetermined by the external source. In addition, an entertainment system can play a specific radio station only if the entertainment system is within the broadcast range of the radio station. Accessing music from the internet is possible only when there is a working internet connection. Access to music on external storage memory is possible only when the memory is present and connected to the entertainment system. In contrast, locally stored music does not face these limitations and is available to the system at all times.
If the user wants to listen to new music, he has different options. He could copy the new content into the entertainment system's memory himself by copying it from an external storage device. This requires him to remember to bring the external storage device into the proximity of the entertainment system. The user could listen to a radio station that potentially plays new songs he is interested in. However, this works only if the station is within the reception range of the entertainment system. He could listen to a personalized radio station on the internet, such as from Last.FM. A problem is that this works only if the internet connection is working. In mobile environments, it is very likely that the entertainment system will find itself in areas that have no mobile internet coverage.
In addition to the music itself, state of the art entertainment systems use meta information such as song name, artist or genre to identify and name the music that is present in the device. This information itself can be stored in the entertainment system. Embedded music databases such as from Gracenote contain information about thousands or even millions of songs. The larger the data base size, the higher the probability that information is found for all songs that are currently stored in the device. But a larger database increases the amount of storage space required. Still, even if the database is large, it does not cover songs that are more recent than the database itself. For this reason, some embedded music data bases allow an online update, i.e., the retrieval of a list of newly published songs. On the other hand, online music services make it possible to look up meta information for individual songs. While this removes the need for an embedded data base, it requires an internet connection. Thus, if the connection fails, then no information can be acquired.
What is neither disclosed nor suggested in the art is a personalized entertainment system that overcomes the problems and limitations described above.